Renewables for H₂ Generation

J. FRASER, Emerson, Leicester, England, UK

When people think about power generation, they traditionally think about the large utilities that supply their homes and businesses with the energy necessary for day-to-day work and life. However, while these suppliers are a critical element of the world’s power generation resources, industrial manufacturers also play a significant role in power generation. Many of the most common industrial processes, like cracking oil or manufacturing chemicals, are highly energy-intensive operations. As a result, many of the sites that operate such processes have their own onsite power generation facilities. 

Typically, these onsite facilities are either importing power from the grid and managing it themselves, creating power onsite with a small power station, or a mix of both. In all cases, most of these organizations share a common new goal: seeking ways to reduce or offset their carbon emissions. Renewable power generation is a perfect tool for this. Many of these plants have the capacity to install or connect to renewable power sources, such as wind, solar or hydroelectric. 

Utilities themselves are under similar increasing pressure from the public and governments to build new or use existing renewable solutions, making it less economically viable to invest in traditional power generation facilities. Incentives from governments around the globe make this the perfect time to invest in renewable technologies.  

However, for both private generation sites and public utilities, renewable energy generation is far less predictable than traditional fossil-fuel sources. Some days, the weather will be ideal and a renewable site will overproduce, creating far more energy than needed. On other days, the sites will underproduce, leaving a deficit that must be filled.  

As a result, traditional thermal power will continue to serve alongside renewables for the near future—this blend creates complexities for both traditional power utilities and process manufacturers managing their own energy. They need ways to balance the dynamic nature of renewables production with the less flexible but more stable production of traditional fossil assets.  

Many organizations are discovering that hydrogen (H₂) has the potential to be a bridge between these two generation styles, but only if their facilities have the right technologies in place.

H₂ increases flexibility. Whether renewable power generation is added alongside a traditional generator inside the fence of a process manufacturing facility or is part of a utility’s portfolio, the producer must begin managing multiple different types of generation and multiple economic models. Based on changing weather and markets—and even changing processes—it will sometimes be most cost effective to run fossil-fuel generation; other times, it will be more cost effective to run renewables, or even purchase energy from the grid.  

Any of these situations can result in an excess of renewable energy. If the plant is using fossil fuel generation or buying from the grid, any renewable energy generated will need to go somewhere. Alternatively, if the plant is using its renewable energy for production, on the best days it might still be generating more power than it needs. While the plant could potentially stop its renewable energy production when the power is not in use, such a solution will dramatically extend the timeline for return on investment (ROI). As a result, teams are hesitant to simply shut down renewable generation systems. 

Moreover, even if the plant is not producing excess renewable energy, traditional energy generation assets are not easy to take on and offline. While it may be possible to reduce production from fossil generation to offset overages, plant operators will be hesitant to take those sites fully offline, as bringing them back online is a significant and time-consuming undertaking. Ultimately, they are still producing energy, and that energy must go somewhere. 

Dealing with excess electricity is not as simple as just sending it to the grid. Power generators can face fines or excess charges for putting extra energy on the grid, as the load it can handle is finite. If one site is producing more than expected and putting it on the grid, another site must reduce its own production to compensate. No organization wants to incur charges simply to give away the electricity it produces. 

Many plants are exploring how H₂ generation can help them navigate these complexities. These organizations are investigating the construction of electrolysis facilities to provide more options for utilizing their generated power. When plants with H₂ facilities have excess energy from generation, they have many more options. If the market is right, they can still sell the electricity to the grid. If not, they can divert it to create H₂, which they can sell directly or convert to ammonia, which can also be transported and sold. Under the right conditions, some plants can even store H₂ for later use or resale. 

Software provides the roadmap. As process manufacturers and utilities add H₂ production options to offset excess energy while still meeting their goals to reduce carbon, they will need expert insights to help them maintain flexibility and profitability to better navigate constantly changing markets. The decisions will vary based on the geography of their operations.

Local operations. Within the fence of a process manufacturing plant, a user might be an asset owner putting energy on the grid, but occasionally needing to curtail generation as production outstrips demand. Today, that producer might be pitching wind turbine blades down or disabling solar arrays to generate less energy when conditions are favorable—a sub-optimal solution due to the potential for lost revenue and longer ROI for their renewable energy installation.  

By adding one or more electrolyzers, that same producer can likely eliminate curtailing and divert excess energy from the grid to create H₂. With these new options, operations teams control their own destiny. Shrewd operators can watch the unit cost of H₂ and the sell price of energy, and then make decisions based on those real-time values.

Regional operations. Regional operations are similar to local operations, with the exception that the organization likely has production assets in one area and H₂ (and other) consumption assets elsewhere. Instead of a directly connected system, these operators work with a virtual system over a grid. The physical power grid acts as the on-ramp and off-ramp for power, but the team can use a virtual power grid to make decisions about when and how they add and remove power to the physical grid. 

In such a configuration, when prices are right, the generator can supply excess energy to the grid as electrolyzers simultaneously remove it. Using this technique, operators can create a demand and then get compensated at the highest rates to meet that demand themselves. 

Cross-country operations. At the national level, the goals of energy optimization begin to shift. Because an organization operating many sites throughout a country will be working with many different utilities, creating demand in one site and supplying another will not be a 1:1 transaction. Instead, companies operating at this level move from economic to environmental optimization. The organization may be using fossil energy to create product in one area while generating a surplus of renewable energy in another. When calculated together, the outcome can be net-zero operations. 

Global operations. Like cross-country operations, global operations are focused on environmental optimization, but at a larger scale. Cloud connectivity empowers enterprise teams to start globalizing their renewables operations while still monitoring and managing them all from a single location. 

SCADA is evolving to provide increasing flexibility. As organizations begin to incorporate H₂ into their operations to improve sustainability and profitability in tandem, they will need comprehensive, integrated software for the controls layer. The best automation solutions will provide comprehensive monitoring and control for all of the company’s potential generating sources—wind, solar, hydroelectric, H₂ and storage (FIG. 1).

However, that control layer must also be easily integrated into a fit-for-purpose green energy supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) software solution. The best green SCADA solutions can aggregate critical information from all green energy sources, providing visibility from a single pane of glass in a centralized control facility (FIG. 2).

Where the control layer and green SCADA software intersect, forward thinking companies are building in value with a distributed energy resource management system (DERMS) engineered by their automation provider. DERMS solutions provide a critical gateway between the grid and generation systems, and can aggregate an organization’s generating assets into a single, controllable virtual power plant, which they can then use to increase flexibility and navigate dynamic operations, such as energy diversion to electrolyzers.  

Moreover, as DERMS solutions evolve, they will interface directly with energy trading solutions to help teams manage environmental, demand and market factors across their entire virtual grid. With such a solution, teams will identify—using real-time, multivariate data and analytics from their automation systems—the most efficient and profitable operations from hour to hour.  

Planning for the future. Most companies using H₂ to drive more efficient, profitable renewable power generation are still in the earliest stages of adoption. As those pilot programs show potential, more organizations will adopt similar strategies to help them manage renewables alongside traditional power generation. Forward-thinking organizations—even those not yet pursuing the emerging H₂ economy—are already preparing for such a shift by implementing a foundation of fit-for-purpose automation technologies that will support them as they evolve. 

While organizations can install business solutions that help them start making financial decisions to better support their renewable and H₂ operations, such systems do not link information to actionable insights in the field. A better solution is a fit-for-purpose, integrated automation solution designed by a supplier with decades of power industry experience.  

These industry-leading systems are already building the foundation to use real-time information from assets that provide the decision support needed for optimal operations. As the need for flexibility in power generation and distribution continues to increase, such solutions will be critical drivers of competitive advantage across every organization that produces power. H₂T

About the author

James Fraser has 25 yr of automation experience in the power industry. As Vice President of renewables, Fraser is responsible for leading the continued development and execution of Emerson’s renewable strategy. His focus is driving the global growth of Emerson’s expanding renewable capabilities through the increased sales of software and automation technologies of the Ovation Green Suite of solutions, as well as the quality implementation of users’ clean energy portfolios, including wind, solar, hydro and energy storage projects.  

Fraser earned a BS degree in control systems engineering from the University of Sheffield and an MBA from the University of Cranfield.